You may have to try to repartition the drive, you can do this while installing windows on the disk. If a partition table is corrupted it can make windows think there is more pr less space on a disk, Ive had tables corrupted so bad on dying drives they reported 999999999 gb on a 40 gb drive. you may want to look into getting a new hard drive as well if this is occurring.

You need to tell us more, like what operating system, how many partitions, virtual and real, etc. You need to run Disk Manager and not just look at the properties in the file browser.We need to know what file system each partition has, like FAT32 or NTFS, etc. You most likely have a back up or restore partition set up by the manufacturer, and that is using up space.So you need to tell us if this is a brand computer or a generic?

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Hi Donna. The properties of your hard drive shown when you open Computer (My Computer in Windows XP) help you to see your used and free space. Even though your hard drive has a capacity of 160 GB, useable space is always less because the operating systems were designed to allocate a percentage of the total to be used for various operations necessary for smooth sailing. Right clicking the hard drive icon and selecting properties opens to you tools used to keep your hard drive healthy along with information regarding the hard drives % of use. Try it out if you haven't already. Good Day

Depends on what you are using the hard drive for. For example if this hard drive is going to be used for multimedia then I would recommend a hard drive around 120Gb to 1TB, but if it's for a small office with MS Windows XP installed it should be just enough to host the operating system and a limited amount of programs, hope this help, best of luck

You can download a free trial of Partition Magic, it a good HDD Formatting tool.
Download from here
Download and install it, Got a really Easy and User friendly interface, probably your HDD got some unformatted space or there may be Partition Table Error.
The software will guide you further.
Do update me, what was the result.Regards,Waqar.

Actually You need at least 40 gigabytes minimum for Vista to work well. The only thing that You can do is to format the hard drive, and re-install Vista with at least 40 gigabytes available in its partition.